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The 14th century gives us back two contradictory imageson the hand a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry and exquisitely illuminated Books of Hours; on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony-a world plunged into chaos. These are the years when the Black Death...killing more than a third of the population ... more »between India and Iceland.....when freebooting brigands terrorized europe with impunity....and a hundred years war seemed to have no beginning and no end, an epic of brutality and bravery checkered by disgrace when chivalry was crumbling under the impact of new weapons and tactics...peasant revolts swept Europe evoking panic and fierce repressions by the ruling class...when papal schism rent the Christian world-with Pope and anti-pope excommunicating each other...yet this was the time of Chaucer and Petrarch, Wycliff, the Sorbonne and Oxford....tournaments and pageants cults of death, rot and dispair...the grain and texture of life as it was lived: what was childhood like, what was marriage like. How money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike....................« less